John Gonzalez weighs all three of the columnists and finds them wanting:

... In a city that needs bold opinions, particularly now that Bailey is gone, who among them is up to the task? Walker is inconsistent. So is Abraham, who just returned to writing this spring after spending much of her first year as a columnist on maternity leave. Cullen, meanwhile, exhausted much of his first year finding his chi. What kind of cattle prod does it take these days to make a Globe columnist earn his feed? ...

He also provides the rules for the Kevin Cullen drinking game. Yes, you get points for every Irish reference.

Not a clue why somebody would do that, but somebody did - with his column from today. Can you notice a difference?

The column itself is a plea for the legislature to pass a same-day registration bill for voters. Sounds good to me, although does anybody know what the president of the League of Women Voters was studying in grad school back in 1986? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe somebody who'd gotten to grad school would not realize that if you're registered to vote in Amherst, you can't just show up and vote in Cambridge (at least, not yet). If it's anything related to political science, or sociology or any other field that requires some working knowledge of our political system, she might want to find another example to use to push the bill.

And the question is: Does Adrian Walker's column provide any new insights into Boston Fire Department scandals?

Howie Carr does the same basic column, only better, aside from a couple of Shaughnessy-like references to events that happened 30 years ago that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

With Hendry Street condos going for record prices and soup kitchens and drug dens long since converted into chic bistros, it's just a wonderful time to be in Boston - unless you're a metro columnist for the Boston Globe, in which case it's become so hard to find local stories that you find yourself writing about poor people in Uganda and Catholic food pantries in Washington, DC.

Credit to Adrian Walker for not regurgitating last week's news in his column today, which tells us how one mother channeled her grief over her son's murder into a foundation trying to stop more murders. So it's probably being really nitpicky to ask if it would have ruined the column to provide a link for people who might want more information about the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. He was probably just following corporate edicts against using URLs that don't start with boston.com...

That's because Joe Keohane does a much better job, explaining why today’s Adrian Walker column is sub-par, even for him:

... [T]oday's column on Deval Patrick’s book deal not only contains the most lazily pedestrian takeaway imaginable (Deval needs to prove he's going to stick around and govern), but comes about a week and a half after BZ's Jon Keller broke the story in the first place, and, I would argue, five days after the rest of the press stopped intensively covering it. ... Why, oh lord, do the good ones always take the buyouts?

On the one hand, his column today tells you absolutely nothing you either couldn't have read in a news account or couldn't have already thought to yourself, given a spare 30 seconds (this is just a terrible, terrible tragedy and how many more little kids have to die before we, as a society, do something about it?).

On the other hand, he did write a column about actual breaking Boston news that people are actually talking about (as opposed to some issue several days after the fact that most people could care less about), so give him a hand for that.

Charge will be dismissed in a year if he stays out of trouble, completes alcohol counseling.

Earlier:
Adrian Walker may have a problem.

Walker arrested on OUI charges while in a Globe car early Sunday. Pleaded innocent in Dorchester District Court.

Globe brief.

No.

Compare his column with Peter Gelzinis's column on Saturday, when this was all still breaking news.